Over the last several years, the World Wide Web has grown rapidly with an ever-increasing number of users and web sites offering a variety of content to those users. The growth in web sites has lead to competition among those sites for visits by the various users. Recently, web sites have begun to include advertising in the web pages, which has further increased the competition to attract users.
In order to attract users, operators of web sites have employed a number of strategies, primarily involving updating or changing the content, or incorporating appealing designs and appealing content. Updating or changing the content on a web site is desirable because new material tends to attract return visits by users. If the content is not updated, a user would have little incentive for returning to most web sites once the user has viewed all of the content.
Updating or changing a web site, however, may be extremely expensive. First, there is a large "editing" cost in determining what new content to add. Generally, an individual must read through a variety of "stories" or ideas for stories in order to determine which ones should be added to the web site. Once the new content has been selected, it must then be typed in and formatted, usually using Hypertext Mark-Up Language (HTML) in order for the content to be used on the system. If cross-referencing of the content is desired, hyperlinks must be created, which adds to the expense of incorporating the new material.